Wit.ai Aims to Become Twilio of Natural Language

Y Combinator classmates Alexandre Lebrun (the founder and CEO of VirtuOz) and Willy Blandin have launched Wit.ai, a startup geared at providing an API that can incorporate natural language processing and speech recognition into apps, or even hardware. Wit.ai’s objective is to bring down the cost of developing natural language-enabled applications from over $100,000 per app to near zero using the API. Within months of launch, the API --- which the company pitches as “natural language for the Internet of Things” --- has attracted 2,000 registered developers.

Through Wit.ai, developers will be able to speech-enable their apps with just a few lines of code much the same way Stripe’s API can enable apps for mobile payments.

The company’s Web site claims that “it’s faster and more accurate than Siri, and requires no upfront investment, expertise, or training dataset.”